Day 13 of 30 Days of TV Shows

Day 13 – Favorite childhood show

So, my first impulse was to try to choose between the two titans of my childhood viewing: thinly-disguised toy commercials GI Joe and Transformers. I played with the toys, watched the shows, and in certain ways could not get enough. But they were also the first shows where I realized that a) they were thinly-disguised commercials and b) that they featured an inherent limitation in their storytelling, in that there could be peril, but most everything had a narrative reset to it, other than the occasional week-long miniseries… which only hit the reset button at the very end.

But the show that I always looked forward to, always anticipated, and still have fond memories of is Danger Mouse. Sometimes I think that was the Phineas & Ferb of my childhood (as I can see myself being very excited about P&F the way my dad was and is very excited about DM), in that it was animation and on Nickelodeon and such, but had plenty of humor I didn’t really get until much later in life. Sure, it had certain narrative resets as well, but not as many, and it seemed like it was just there for its own sake, though I think there was a belated US merchandising thing. But the show wasn’t produced by a toy company, unlike GI Joe/Transformers.

Anyway, if you’re not familiar, the show was about a white mouse with an eyepatch and a job as a secret agent. His sidekick was a gerbil (?) named Penfold, and a boss rodent of some kind named Colonel K. His nemesis was a toad named Baron Greenback, who had a pet fuzzy white caterpillar in the mold of Ernst Blofeld’s cat, and a couple of crow-ish henchmen. Greenback hatched schemes, and DM foiled them. Pretty simple concept, but room for plenty of humor and absurd takes on the spy/secret-agent genre.

To this day, I’m still known to utter the occasional, “Oooh crumbs, oooh crikey” in the manner of Penfold.

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Mirrored from Bum Scoop.